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Could North Korea Be America’s Next Forever War?

The estimable Mira Rapp-Hooper, CNAS Senior Fellow, and also a
Senior Fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School,
recently published a thorough take-down of the illogic of the
so-called “bloody nose” option against North Korea.
Here are a few choice passages:

It makes little sense for American war planners to assume a
“limited” strike like this would stay limited…. If
[Kim Jong Un decided] to hit back, the result could be the most
calamitous U.S. conflict since World War II.

Much of the speculation about the supposed benefits of the
bloody nose revolves around the presumption that Kim would not
retaliate. But, as Rapp-Hooper notes:

If Kim is irrational on matters concerning his nuclear
weapons and missiles, it’s reasonable to assume he’d be similarly
irrational across the board. If he cannot be stopped from trying to
reunify the two Koreas, further U.S. or UN sanctions are also
unlikely to alter his cost calculations…. Irrational actors are
irrational in all domains—Washington does not have the luxury
of picking and choosing where deterrence prevails.

The case against the United States initiating force against any
country, especially a nuclear-armed North Korea, is strong. Indeed,
Korea expert Victor Cha raisedall the right questions last week.

If we believe that Kim is undeterrable without such a
strike, how can we also believe that a strike will deter him from
responding in kind? And if Kim is unpredictable, impulsive and
bordering on irrational, how can we control the escalation ladder,
which is premised on an adversary’s rational understanding of
signals and deterrence?

He concludes:

The United States must continue to prepare military options.
Force will be necessary to deal with North Korea if it attacks
first, but not through a preventive strike that could start a
nuclear war.

Under normal circumstances, these sorts of arguments should rule
the day. Americans would have learned something from our other
still-open-ended conflicts—mostly wars that we
started—and be anxious to avoid future ones. Donald Trump
secured the Republican nomination by railing against the Iraq war, started by a
Republican, claimed (falsely) that he had always opposed that war, and
hinted that he was intent upon avoiding similar misadventures,
including the war in Afghanistan (that he subsequently expanded). A careful reading
of Trump’s campaign statements would have revealed his hawkish instincts, but a number of voters
were focused on Trump’s opponent, who they were convinced was
an even bigger hawk.

Still, given public sentiment—and Trump’s occasional
skepticism—it would be reasonable to expect that new wars
were unlikely. Or, at least, that he was unlikely to start
them.

As I said, under “normal” times. Alas, these are not
normal times. Neither Rapp-Hooper nor Cha are likely to appear on “Fox and Friends,”
which seems to be the best way to reach President Trump. So expect
the drums of war to keep beating.

I would offer just one caveat to Rapp-Hooper’s excellent
article. She notes how National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster has
focused on North Korea’s ICBM capability “as opposed to
any of Kim’s other weapons systems or behavior” as the
Trump administration’s red line.

Such a declaration gives Pyongyang ample notice that
Washington’s extended-deterrence commitments to its allies will
become less credible once Kim deploys long-range missiles, and that
the United States values its homeland far more than it values its
international partners. It signals that we are gravely concerned
for ourselves, but that allies are no more than a passing
worry.

That is always the problem with extended deterrence. Countries
do value their own security over that of others, if forced
to choose. Knowing this, and in order to prove the credibility of
extended deterrent threats to allies and adversaries alike, U.S.
leaders might undertake actions that do not serve narrow U.S.
national security interests. These actions might be fairly
innocuous, such as sanctions or diplomatic pressure, but they might
also include wars fought on behalf of allies.

There is no doubting Washington’s commitment and capacity
for responding to an attack on any square inch of U.S. territory,
from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. But, as Henry Kissinger
noted many years ago, “Because the
consequences of our weapons technology are so fearsome, we have not
found it easy to define a casus belli which would leave no
doubt concerning our moral justification to use force.”
Thomas Schelling, a leading strategist of the Cold War, shared
Kissinger’s concerns. “To fight abroad is a
military act, but to persuadeenemies or allies that one
would fight abroad, under circumstances of great cost and risk,
requires more than a military capability,” wrote Schelling, with emphasis, in his seminal
work, Arms and Influence. “Extended
deterrence,” Schelling continued, “requires projecting
intentions. It requires having those intentions, even
deliberately acquiring them, and communicating them persuasively to
make other countries behave.”

In short, we shouldn’t understate the difficulty of
maintaining credible extended deterrence, or ignore the attendant
costs and risks to the state issuing such deterrent threats. These
risks now do (or soon will) include North Korean nuclear-tipped
ICBMs targeting U.S. cities.